Tools I like as an amateur

I work with AI professionally and as an individual that thinks things are cool. Actually getting the overview and understanding the big picture vs figuring out practical things that work is very different, and depending on what I'm doing different things catch my attention.

Ksenia Se and I see a lot of the same stuff, but the things that catch my attention are quite different. Things like OpenAI releases, new mid-journey models, the dramas of OpenAI's board room or interesting Inflection "acuihires" are generally intersecting and gives you a sense of where the industry is going.

If you are in the trenches, as it were, there are slightly different thoughts. I'm very interested in things like Ollama, DeepSeek, and the Vercel AI SDK for example that aren't necessarily interesting from a general perspective but quite fascinating on what they can enable. I'm getting to be more of a claude champion (their artifacts are way better in practice, token caching amazing) which is sort of a gut feeling based on working different APIs.

ollama lets you run models in the privacy of your own computer; easy to download to "regular hardware", no "cost", and playing around with various parameter tweaking is super interest. There's something freeing about this.

DeepSeek is wild both in how cheap it was to train, but it goes back to the idea of how small can a foundation model really be. There's something very exciting with this, it feels transformational that smaller models will be smarter than we can imagine now.

The Vercel AI SDK is like low level code plumbing, that you technically don't actually need and you could probably just rewrite it all but it hits the sweetspot of abstractions and usefulness. Its a breath of fresh air after poking around with LangChain – what it attempts is much less, but the balancing of complexity and functionally is Just Better.

Getting your hands deep into it gives a different perspective and it's hard to generalize.